


Rats

by JasperIsAFanboy



Category: Dishonored (Video Game), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Implied 00Silva, Implied/Referenced Torture, Poisonings, Suicide Attempt, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-07
Updated: 2016-04-07
Packaged: 2018-05-31 20:09:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6485785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JasperIsAFanboy/pseuds/JasperIsAFanboy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a rat in the corner of his cell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rats

**Author's Note:**

> Written ages ago after vaeltaa mentioned similarities between Raoul Silva and Corvo. I'd wanted to draw it but wrote it instead, and them promptly forgot about it and didn't post it for ages. And then I did. Thought I'd post it here because why not.
> 
> Tagged as suicide attempt rather than suicide because, well, it's only sort of successful? And apparently you can't tag for suicide and suicide attempt simultaneously, or at least I couldn't. Idk I tried.

There is a rat in the corner of his cell.

Tiago stares at it with dull brown eyes. He thinks of his grandmother and her little island and the warm, sunlit shores of Serkonos, his boyhood home. There had been rats on the island, an infestation resulting from a handful that had come on a boat. They fed on the coconuts that fell from the trees growing wild on the island. But his grandmother, the clever, strong matriarch that she was, had merely placed a board against a deep metal tub to form a ramp, placed lumps of whale meat on the board and in the barrel, and bade him wait. Soon enough the rats came for the meat, tumbled from the board and into the tub, and it slowly filled with writhing furry bodies.

A guard passes by his cell door, mumbling to himself about his gut. Tiago doesn’t watch him; he’d have to turn his head and that would open the sundry wounds inflicted by the Royal Interrogator to his neck and shoulders. He curls tighter on himself, his manacles clinking, and he winces at the sound. He always hated the sound of chains, so high and piercing and driving right through his ears. He can feel his ribs beneath his hand, sharp like the slats of a fence.

His grandmother’s house on the island had had a white picket fence.

Some lingering shreds of vanity mourn his body. He had been so handsome once, strong of limb and features, his once-broken nose enhancing his profile and turning it leonine. His beautiful dark eyes with their heavy lids had enticed many a lovely young woman or man to his bed; bedroom eyes, they’d called them. Now his eyes are almost lost amongst the shadows of his sunken sockets and bruises, and his limbs withered and scarred. He probes a loose tooth with his tongue.

He wishes he’d never left Serkonos. But what had his homeland to offer him? Subservient to Gristol, exoticised and fetishised, held tame and terrified by the memory of what happened to Morley like the rest of the empire. It seemed the only way for a man to make his way in the world was to head to Gristol, to its capital city, Dunwall. He’d thought to start with the Watch, and he had been very good there. No one was as fast, as tenacious, as clever as Tiago Rodriguez, and he’d moved up through the ranks as quickly and easily as he’d climbed the trees of his grandmother’s island.

She didn’t let him look in the tub with the rats after they’d all fallen in.

Someone noticed his meteoric rise. The Royal Spymaster’s second-in-command, the secret post, occupied by the enigmatic woman known only as M. Small, her silvering hair cropped short, a terrier of a woman who inspired a mix of fear and adoration in her subordinates, treating them like an iron-handed mother with a brood of thoroughly unruly children, and under her they flourished. She’d seen the Serkonan prodigy, had invited him into her cabal of spies and sneaks across the empire. Once of them, a young man from Morley with anger and violence and arrogance shimmering in his piercing blue eyes, had caught Tiago’s eye almost immediately. James Bond, what a perfect little hound M had in him; viciously loyal to her and Gristol, more than willing to do whatever it took to see himself and his mission through. Tiago enjoyed watching him, would have enjoyed fucking him if he’d thought Bond had room with the stick up his arse.

But M had enemies, as any powerful person does. In Gristol, particularly Dunwall, powerful women seemed to attract deadlier enemies, if only because their society could not stomach the thought that women were equal to men in strength and intelligence. (Tiago had never chafed at a woman commander; indeed, there had been many powerful women above him in the Watch. Besides, no man of Serkonos ever underestimated women, given the power wielded there by the Oracular Order.) Dunwall, Tiago felt, was a very bitter city. It had reason to be, he supposed; the plague’s effects were still felt in some parts of the city, in every building still painted with a plague marker, every lingering remnant of Hiram Burrows’ paranoia, every fine home empty because its inhabitants had been banished to the Flooded District. It had been vanquished ten years ago, but no one would forget such a time of chaos and fear so quickly.

One of those enemies had been bitter enough to want to hurt not only M, but her people. Somehow, Tiago had fallen under that unknown person’s axe, and found himself arrested and thrown into Coldridge for high treason. After Burrows, no one would look too closely at such a charge, not even the Lord Protector himself, who’d come in person to see his fellow countryman clapped in irons. If seeing another Serkonan in Gristolian chains moved Attano at all, he gave no sign of it. It had outraged Tiago to see him there, to see him believing the claim of high treason so implicitly. After all, hadn’t he been falsely accused of the same? Hadn’t he suffered for a crime he did not, would never commit? Tiago understood the need to take no chances with such a charge, but surely Attano at least would make sure it was true before handing him off to the Coldridge guards and the Royal Interrogator. Perhaps the idea of a threat to the Empress he loved like a daughter (who probably was his daughter in reality) was enough to blunt his caution; better safe than sorry and all that.

At first he’d thought M would rescue him. That she’d turn up in Coldridge, holding evidence of his innocence, with that familiar glare on her face that just dared anyone to get in her way, ready to save her wayward boy. Of course she would; he was one of her best, one of her favourites. She wouldn’t leave him to rot, would she?

But as the nights turned and the months piled atop each other like the rats in the tub, conviction turned to hope, hope turned to desperation, and desperation turned to despair. No one listened to his protestations of innocence, no one cared that he couldn’t confess to something he hadn’t done, no one cared that he would never ever sell out M. (That was how he’d learned, intuitively and deductively, that one of her enemies had put him here; she was a loyal servant of Gristol and the Empress, and to get rid of her they’d need some extremely serious charges. She was too important, too well-placed to remove without proper preparation. It’d take one or more of her people being guilty of high treason, an accusation that she was getting too old to do her job anymore, to oust her from her place.) Oh, he’d certainly sold a few secrets here and there, gotten into a few beds that didn’t need a Gristolian spy between their sheets in search of other secrets, acted outside of his orders, but it had only ever been for Gristol, for M. Everything he had ever done, he had done out of loyalty. In his own way, he was as loyal as lovely James. But the indifference, that was the worst part. By this point, even the Interrogator just seemed to be torturing him for the fun of it, not because he expected him to give anything up by now.

He couldn’t imagine what fun was left in torturing him. Certainly there isn’t much left of him to torture.

Bitter hatred, as strong as the worst poison, wells in his veins, but numb despair holds him still, keeps him in his foetal position on his side. No one is coming to rescue him. M has abandoned him. He has but one option of escape, and it is so unutterably final that even now, even in this black moment of hopelessness, he balks at it. Death should never be considered lightly, even in the darkest hour.

But what else does he have left to him? He looks over at the rat in the corner of his cell. He wonders if the rats will come to him after he dies, if they’ll nibble at what flesh remains on his corpse and die of the same poison. He fancies briefly that there’s nothing left of him but bitter leather skin and dusty veins and brittle bones, stripped of flesh and sinew and organs.

His back left molar is a false tooth, hollow whalebone. It’s sturdy enough that an ill-placed bite while eating wouldn’t shatter it, but a well-placed bite will break it to powder, along with the capsule of poison therein. It’s supposed to be a new toxin derived from the venom of a small, brightly coloured octopus off the Pandyssian coast and the nectar of a few Serkonan plants, but it used to be a vicious neurotoxin from the dog button plant (also from Pandyssia, of course). Dog button was the Serkonan name; Gristol called it poison nut, and the natural philosophers called it strychnos nux vomica. They’d been switching over to the blend when Tiago was given his suicide pill, and for the life of him he can’t remember which one he has.

He hopes it’s the new blend. He’s heard stories about strychnine, and he’s seen its effects on rats. Some of them bit through their tongues in the seizures caused by the poison, and they were all suffering horribly before they finally succumbed to asphyxiation. The new blend numbs the body from the extremities on in, causing unconsciousness first. The longest Tiago’s ever seen it take was one minute. Strychnine can take hours, and only the lucky few lose consciousness. Most are well aware of the spasms their bodies are enduring.

But even hours of pain followed by black oblivion are a comfort, compared to the thought of more torture. Tiago makes his decision. He bites down on the tooth, breaking it open, and swallows the capsule.

It doesn’t take long. He vomits first, then dry heaves, hard enough that he expects to see shreds of his stomach lining amongst the bile and remnants of the dry bread they’d given him a few hours ago. The convulsions are the worst. His body burns and jerks and searing, boiling pain screams through his limbs and back as he contorts. He screams as well, until his throat tears and blood trickles from his mouth and his cries fall silent without ceasing. He thinks, in a moment of strange lucidity, that his veins and nerves are ablaze and that he can see them, lines of fire tracing like lightning all throughout his body. He jack-knifes like a landed hagfish, again and again, his muscles shrieking their protestations into the whirling terror and indifferent work of the poison. His face is a rictus of agony and suffering, his eyes squeezed shut.

And slowly the pain turns from heat to chill as though ice water is replacing his blood. His muscles relax, and he drifts into a blue oblivion. He opens his eyes, sees floating islands of masonry and street. A whale swims through the blessedly cool air. Ahead, he sees his grandmother’s island and the metal tub. He walks over to it and peers in. It is full of rat skeletons, occupied by one silvery-blond rat. The rat looks up at him placidly, looking almost self-satisfied somehow.

His grandmother had kept an eye on the tub of rats, even as she kept him away from it. One day, she beckoned him over. The inside walls were painted with blood, the bottom covered in gnawed bones, occupied only by two rats. The rodents looked mean and vicious, sleek scarred things that glared up at Tiago and his grandmother as though they wanted to devour them, too. His grandmother tipped the tub onto its side and they watched the rats run into the trees.

“Hello, Tiago.”

The Outsider stands behind the tub, darkness and shadow bleeding from him like the undulating dance of seaweed in the current. He is handsome and terrible, a god wearing the face of a drowned young man, his eyes as black as a starless night sky. Tiago feels a brief compulsion to drop to his knees before him but ignores it. The Outsider looks into the tub at the lone rat.

“When your grandmother released the last two rats from the tub, did she tell you what they had done to survive?” he asks. His words are slow, measured, weighted with ages and eons passed and witnessed. He gestures at the rat as he talks, and the movement is in keeping with his voice.

“They ate the others,” Tiago answers. He realises they’re speaking Serkonan, a language he hasn’t spoken seriously in years. Oh, he’d spoken a few phrases here and there, when a bed partner wanted to hear it, but he hadn’t truly spoken his mother-tongue since he’d left Karnaca.

The Outsider looks at him, and he nearly crumples under the weight of that impassive gaze. “They did indeed,” he replies. “And they never again ate anything else, neither whale meat nor coconut meat. Only rat. You changed their nature.” His head tilts slightly. “How like man, to try to corrupt and change the nature of a thing simply because it annoys them.”

Tiago shrugs. “They were eating my grandmother’s garden,” he replies. “Stealing her food. What was she supposed to do, let them?”

For a brief moment, Tiago thinks the Outsider is amused. He (it? Can human concepts like gender truly be applied to this alien being, this extrusion and expression of the Void? The Outsider only looks human; perhaps the Outsider only looks male as well) comes closer to Tiago and stares into his eyes. Tiago can scarcely bear the weight of his regard, but he does, somehow. That same stubbornness and desire to prove himself and his worth that had so characterised him in xenophobic Dunwall seems to keep him upright and unbent even before a god.

“You have been a pawn in a game between people who give you less thought than the rats in the sewers, disposable, cheap, easily lost and scarcely mourned,” the Outsider says after a long moment of scrutiny. “You, too, were lured into a tub and left to fight to survive, to kill and devour or to be killed and devoured yourself.”

Tiago snorts. “This is Dunwall,” he says. “Dunwall’s the tub, and we are all the rats.”

“Would you eat rat, Tiago?” the Outsider asks. “Would you turn cannibal to survive? Would you devour the ones who stand in your way?”

Tiago unhesitatingly answers, “Yes.”

The Outsider’s expression doesn’t change, but Tiago knows, somehow, that he’s definitely amused. The Outsider makes a brief gesture, and the back of Tiago’s left hand burns. He looks down in time to see a mark appearing there, tracing in lines of blue and amber fire before turning deep black. His breath comes short, and not from pain.

“I do hope, Tiago, that you’ll prove yourself more than a pawn,” the Outsider says. “The powers that come from that mark are yours to do with as you please, and I hope you’ll at least be interesting to watch.”

The rat in the tub squeaks at him, and Tiago comes to on the floor of his cell. His entire body aches horribly, maddening and sharp as the torturer’s knives. His body is frozen in a twisted, agonising pose, bent back nearly double like a bow drawn to its fullest extent. The rat, which had been nibbling at his fingertips, jumps away when his hand twitches and he groans in misery. All of his muscles are locked.

Light is streaming in from his window, the rosy light of dawn. After a while of trying to force his body to relax, he at last manages to move. He looks at his left hand, sees the black mark there, dark as a tattoo. He grins, his facial muscles presumably returning to the rictus he’d worn from the strychnine. He clenches his fist, looks at the rat as knowledge floods his mind of taking another’s body. The mark flares, the burning cold of the Void, and he is looking out of the rat’s eyes.

He would laugh if he could. It’s a simple matter to escape now, to slip through the bars and into the shadows. When the rat dies he’s forced from its body back into his own, but there is no shortage of spare rats. He makes his way out of Coldridge jumping from rat to rat, leaving a trail of furry corpses behind. He does not relax or allow himself to grow cocky, knowing that one mistake can mean the end of him. It is only when he is in the sewers, unconsciously following the same route that Corvo Attano himself once followed, that he allows himself to reflect on his escape, to shout and laugh with joy, as much as his battered, exhausted body allows.

A rat scurries over to him, climbs onto his knee. At first glance, he thinks it’s a white albino, but he realises its fur is actually pale grey, nearly silver. He grins at it.

“Hello, rat,” he says cheerfully. It nibbles lightly at his finger when he holds his hand out to it, and he laughs. “Hey, little one, don’t eat me. Or I’ll have to eat you, and I don’t want to eat you.” He looks towards Dunwall, towards the tower where M and her hounds work. “I don’t want to spoil my supper.”


End file.
